Streaming media (e.g., video and/or audio) to mobile devices such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc., is an important emerging market. For example, in order to lessen a user's perceived duration of being “on-hold,” a customized movie trailer or other interesting video content may be streamed to the mobile device. Also, being able to select and watch professionally produced material such as sports, or movies while away from a home or office environment greatly expands the market for video on demand (VoD). Additionally, adding a video back channel (e.g., expressions, gestures, postures, etc.) lessens the perceived gap between remote and local interactions.
As seen with the revenue generated by the ring-back tones and the push-to-talk markets, new telco-services markets can be quite large and can occur in unexpected areas, the promise of fresh markets is one of the driving forces behind the use of third generation (3G) wireless standards in Asia and the move to these standards in Europe. Even in the United States, where 2.5G/3G adoption lags other parts of the world, there have already been some streaming video products for consumer handsets (e.g., cellular telephones).
Unfortunately, the promise of these markets is largely unrealized to date, due to two major barriers. One barrier is the fact that many of the mobile devices which access streaming media have limited capabilities (e.g., limited processing and/or memory capacities) and offer restricted interfaces to the end-user. Thus, these mobile devices lack the resources to effectively operate complex media presentation applications which can be utilized, for example, on a user's home computer, or to store large amounts of data. The restricted interfaces typically found in these devices limits how the user navigates and selects a plurality of options (e.g., voice mail options, or a list of movies which may be accessed). As a result, the user typically must wait until the options, which are presented serially over an audio interface, are presented. Another drawback to these interfaces is that the user may be required to enter a complex keying sequence to indicate a selected action.
Another barrier to these markets is the wireless communication infrastructure (e.g., cellular telephone networks) used to deliver streaming media to the mobile devices. For example, delivering the streaming media is constrained by the telecommunications network interface and codec standards (e.g., the Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)) that must be maintained within the telecommunications network. This particularly shapes how interactive control of the streaming media can be implemented.
While the telecommunications providers want to provide a responsive interface with rich functionality to the user, they do not necessarily want to implement special client software on the mobile devices which may not be compliant with existing network standards. For example, telecommunications providers are extremely sensitive to the types of data allowed onto their networks, particularly since viruses attacking cellular devices and/or networks are becoming more common. Additionally, when moving data from an Internet Protocol (IP) network to the telecommunications network even more constraints are introduced. As a result, the telecommunications providers typically will not allow data packets to enter their networks that are not compliant with their standards. One result of this is that user's of mobile devices are limited in the choices of media players which can operate on their devices. Another result is that existing interfaces do not provide user's with the level of responsiveness and/or ease of use that they have come to expect with streaming media presented over their home computer systems.